Manage Yourself Before You Manage Your Business

Hey, my friends, it's Louis Massaro. And welcome to another episode of the Moving Mastery podcast.

Next step organization.

So you have self management.

You need to manage yourself before you can manage anything else.

And the one thing I hate to hear more than anything is like, yeah, but I'm just not an organized person.

You know, I'm not really, you know, that's not my. I'm not. That's not me.

Right?

Everything is a learned skill.

A lot of the stuff that it might seem that I'm natural at doing was stuff that I learned how to do because I saw the benefit. The only way you're going to, like, want to learn how to do something is because you see the result that it might get you.

Self management. The result is your life just flows smooth, right? Instead of just like rolling out of bed every day and be like, all right, life, connect your cords to me and just pull me where you want me to go all day. Send me here, send me there. Showing up to your office like, what's going on? Everything good? Oh, we got a problem over here. Let me come over here. All right, Go check my emails. Oh, I'm going to do this. Oh, I'm going to run off on this. Handle this email.

Email. Your inbox is a nice, neat, organized place for other people's agendas. Not your agenda, not what's important to you. Okay? It's a trap.

A lot of people get stuck in that trap and feel that they're being productive. We're going to talk about it a little bit more. All right? First thing you need to do is you need to plan your day.

Whether you do it the night before, whether you do it in the morning, you need to take some time and plan your day and think it through.

This is hard for a lot of go getters to do a lot of this stuff that I'm talking about, the go getters are like, man, he's trying to put the brakes on me. I just want to go, man, how am I going to get all this done if he keeps telling me to slow down and take 10 minutes to do this and 20 minutes to do that?

If you need to chop a tree down and you just keep swinging the axe at it and you never take time to stop. Sharpen the saw, okay? It's going to take you a long time to chop that tree down and you're going to be exhausted.

Twice as many swings at that tree. You need to take the time to prepare a little bit. Alright? So what I do every morning, I set my timer on my phone for 20 minutes, get a sheet of paper, journal, kind of like the ones you guys have there. Go in top of the sheet. Projects. What are the current main projects that I'm working on right now?

The main things that are really moving the needle forward.

All this week it's been seminar, seminar, seminar. Okay, what do I need to do to move this forward? Right. So you write down your major projects that you're working on and you might know what they all are, but every morning it allows you to get clear on them. Okay.

Then I go down a few lines because I might still think of something in that area and I want to go back to it. I'll go down a few lines and put people. What people do I need to reach out to and what people am I waiting to hear from? Okay.

The racing in your mind that goes on all the time where you're like, oh, I thought, I gotta think of that, I gotta think of that, I gotta think of that. You're constantly thinking of stuff is because you're keeping it in there. If you get it out.

It'Ll stop racing so much. If you have a system of a place where you could put things except in your mind, it'll stop racing so much.

Next, go down a few lines. Priorities. What are the things I must get done today?

Usually I'll finish this in like, you know, 10 minutes. Timer's set for 20. Go back through the list. I'll say, all right, this is what I'm gonna do. How could I make this excellent? I have the seminar coming up this week. What could I do to make it even better?

Force myself to sit there for the next 10 minutes and look at my whole list. Maybe I go down to the people that have a plan to call somebody that day. How can I make that call go exactly how I want it to go?

And you just start thinking through these things for 10 minutes. Okay. How could I make everything here excellent?

If you don't force yourself to sit there and think about it, you won't think about it. You're just going to be like, getting this done, Getting this done. You're just going to be a doer. Do, do, do, do, do. Take the time, think it through, plan your day, know what you're doing. Real simple, alright?

I also do a weekly review.

Take a look at everything from the past week. And I've toyed around with different times. Friday afternoon, Saturday morning, Sunday night. Currently I do Sunday night. All right. The end of the day, Friday, like, all right. I just want to get to the weekend, relax, chill Sunday, chill Sunday night before I'm getting ready to reengage with the week again. On Monday, I do a review, take a look at what my last week looked like. Look at my calendar, see if there's anything that I forgot, maybe people I need to follow up with from appointments that I had. I look at all my notes that I keep in my journal or my notes that I keep in Evernote. I do both. Okay? See if there's anything that I need to follow up with. File those notes so that they're all put away.

Electronically.

And then start thinking through, well, then I review my goals, right? So the same way we had that, you know, that's your vision that we went through. Take those same seven categories and create goals for them. Create one year goals in those same seven categories. Okay? That was your vision, which hopefully you set it big enough that a year might not be enough time to get it, but set one year goals there too. So I'll review that so that I make sure what I'm working on is bringing me towards that. Right. Sometimes you get lost in projects that are like, really bullshit. Like, when you back up and you look at the big picture of what you really want, what you're really trying to get to, you're like, why am I wasting time on this?

And then I think through what I.

Want my next week to be.

Like, what do I need to do? Is there stuff on my calendar that needs to be moved? Right. Are there people that I have a meeting with that I need to spend some time to prepare for them, that I need to kind of block out some time?

And then you create block time. So block time is basically imagine your calendar, your electronic calendar on your computer, you going in and saying, you know what? Every Monday from 8am to 10am I'm working on all things sales. That's just my time to do that. Okay.

Maybe Thursdays at, you know, 9 to 11. That's your marketing block.

Let me explain why this is so powerful. You come in Monday, and if you're just kind of like hooked up to wherever you your business and life is just dragging you along, you open up your email, it's like, oh, lead provider sending me. Oh, look at this, leads. Oh, my Yelp rep wants me to spend more money. Oh, let me kind of do what everybody else wants me to do. Like a frigging puppet, right? No, you go, hey, it's all right. That's marketing stuff. I'm gonna deal with that Thursday between 9 and 11. Because today, Monday, I have an agenda. That's my agenda, not everybody else's agenda. And what's important to them? You know what's important to yourself, you know what's important to your mission. That's what needs to be focused on. So any area that requires.

Your time and attention should be blocked out on the calendar. One to four hour blocks. Okay. You have a block on the calendar for reviewing your P and L once a month. Right? Anything that's important, you want to block that out. And you always want to organize and execute around your priorities. Ask yourself, am I organizing and executing around priorities.

Or am I just getting the low? We talked dirt we talked yesterday about People love to check off a checklist. That's all of us. We all love that feeling when we could go check done.

But what's Is your life progressing? Is your business progressing because you checked off a bunch of meaningless stuff? It feels good. You might get a little dopamine rush in the head.

But it's not moving you in the direction of your goals and your dreams.

And if you're ready to take your moving company to the next level, make sure you check out my brand new on demand training on how to consistently book more high paying moves all year long. It's called the six Stages of a Moving Company Sales Machine and you can access it right now for free@lewismassaro.com.

Six stages in this training you'll learn the steps you need to take to increase your sales with a smooth running consistent process. This is the same process I use in my moving companies to book 12,000 moves a year. And now I'm training you on how to implement it in your moving company for free. It's available now@lewismassaro.com Six stages.

Sam.